28 Thoughts on Abundance and Growth
Ideas that motivate and shape our work
The Abundance and Growth Fund is a $120 million philanthropic fund dedicated to accelerating technological progress, expanding economic growth, and reducing the cost of living. Our work spans science, innovation, clinical trials, housing, energy, state capacity and more. Here are some of the things that motivate and shape our work:
On Growth
Economic growth increases material prosperity and material prosperity increases human flourishing.
Economic growth and technological progress enable people to live longer and healthier lives.
People living through periods of faster, broadly shared, economic growth believe the world is less zero-sum, which leads to better policies.
Innovations have a very long-lived impact on well-being. Even when a technology becomes obsolete, it is often the foundation of subsequent advances.
Small increases in the rate of discovery and invention compound to have large impacts over time.1
Discovery and invention benefit more than just the inhabitants of the country where they occur, since technologies eventually diffuse worldwide.
Well-being increases with income, but at a declining rate; an extra $1000 means more to someone earning $30,000 than someone earning $300,000. This is a reason it matters that growth be broadly shared.
The Abundance and Progress Studies package
The fact that broad-based growth is desirable does not, on its own, provide much guidance for action.
But there is growing interest in growth-enhancing reforms in several domains: science policy, housing policy, infrastructure permitting, clinical trials, and government state capacity. We group these under ‘Abundance and Progress Studies.’ Progress in these areas is tractable and philanthropic support can make progress more likely.
Sustained economic growth requires both the invention and adoption of new technologies; science reform and permitting reform are more natural complements than they seem at first.
Housing/transportation policy that make cities more desirable places to live is one way to speed up technological progress, since cities have long been engines of progress.
The YIMBY theory of change can be generalized to other technologies; government approval processes slow or stymie new housing, but also the adoption of new technologies like breakthrough drugs or advanced energy.
Speeding the build-out of modern energy technology tends to benefit more than just the country where the buildout occurs, since modern energy technology tends to have lower carbon emissions than existing infrastructure.
Abundance and Social Technologies
One definition of technology is a way of converting inputs - time, labor, and capital - into outputs. The ways humans organize themselves to achieve goals are forms of “social” technology, under this definition. A permitting process is a social technology. So is the FDA procedure for approving a drug. So is a system for selecting which research proposals to fund.
A major theme of the Abundance and Progress Studies movements is increasing the productivity of social technologies; that is, to get better results with less time or labor. Metascience is aimed at improving how we do science; housing policy, infrastructure permitting, and clinical trials, are all aimed at improving government approval processes; state capacity is aimed at raising the general ability of the government to achieve its policy goals.
This focus on increasing productivity is a reason the Abundance and Progress Studies movements attract interest from different ends of the political spectrum. Increased productivity can support different political priorities.
You can increase productivity in one of two ways: adopting the best existing technology, or inventing better technology.
A distinctive friction to adoption of social technology amenable to growth is that incumbents and challengers often disagree whether the status quo should change at all. For example, residents in a city and people who would like to move there may disagree about the desirability of building new housing.
Rising incomes in a democratic system tend to increase the power of incumbents to preserve the status quo.
The “incumbents vs challengers” frame does not map onto the usual partisan axis.
Sometimes you are already using the most advanced social technology. In that case, making progress requires inventing a better social technology.
Inventing a better social technology isn’t that different from inventing any other technology. It calls for research, piloting, and iteration.
Sometimes technologies, including social technologies, have unintended effects. When that happens, you can stop using the technology, but it’s better to switch to (or invent) a technology that achieves its goals without the unintended effects.
Other times, technologies work as intended at the outset, but then the world changes and they become less effective. When that happens, it’s time to update the technology for the new setting.
Abundance today and in the future
The growing interest in Abundance and Progress Studies ideas predates and is distinct from the recent attention on affordability, but Abundance and Progress Studies ideas can help make meaningful and sustained progress on cost of living.
If the rate of invention and discovery accelerates, then it becomes more valuable to reduce bottlenecks that slow adoption of new technologies, like approval processes and permits.
Change usually has winners and losers. Effective approval processes and government policy should try to ensure gains are large and widely shared, and losses are small or compensated. The stakes of getting these right are higher during periods of rapid technological progress.
Abundance and progress studies are ultimately about more than the specific policy areas they focus on today. They are as much an outlook that it is desirable to advance material prosperity and optimistic that efforts to do so will work.
If income grows at 1% per year (as it has over much of the 21st century), then over 50 years income increases by roughly 65%. If income grows at 2% per year (as it did over most of the 20th century), then over 50 years income increases by roughly 170%.